India heightening discrimination against Muslims

The Indian government reportedly plans to drop from a citizenship registration list hundreds of thousands of Bengali-speaking Muslims in the country’s northeastern border state of Assam.

According to reports, the Assam Muslims expressed fear that their names would be excluded from the final draft of a National Record of Citizens (NRC) — a verified registry of Indian nationals to be published on Monday — and be reduced to stateless individuals or “foreigners” who would be disenfranchised and incarcerated.

“If the government has decided to brand us foreigners what can we do?” 60-year-old Abdul Suban was quoted as saying by Reuters. “NRC is trying to finish us off. Our people have died here, but we will not leave this place.”

He was referring to a massacre of Muslims by Hindu mobs in 1983, when scores of people were chased down and killed by machete-armed Hindus intent on driving out Muslim immigrants in one of India’s worst sectarian massacres.

Categorized as “doubtful voters,” Suban said he was still trying to prove his Indian citizenship in the Hindu-majority country 36 years after losing his parents, sister, and a four-year-old daughter in the 1983 massacre.

Survivors of the “Nellie Massacre,” which claimed the lives of around 2,000 people from more than a dozen villages, have given accounts of burying bodies in a mass grave now partly under water.

The reports also said work on the citizens’ register had accelerated under the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Hindu extremist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and that the BJP was gearing up to demand the immediate deportation of those excluded from the NRC to Bangladesh.

It was alleged that the BJP would not confine its movement to Assam and would generalize it to other states in the run-up to the assembly elections in Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, and Chattisgarh, and the general elections of 2019.

To be recognized as Indian citizens, all residents of Assam have been requested to produce documents proving that they or their families lived in the country before March 1971.

NRC chief Prateek Hajela, whose office has processed 66 million documents and spent nearly $180 million in the whole NRC process, said that most of Assam’s 126,000 so-called doubtful voters and an estimated 150,000 of their descendants would be excluded from the NRC list of registry.

Rejecting the NRC exercise as “polarizing,” India’s opposition Congress Party and rights activists said the government was misusing the register to harass and intimidate Muslims by branding them as Bangladeshis.

“BJP’s only aim is to do communal politics, including through the NRC,” Congress lawmaker Ripun Bora said.

Critics say the BJP’s so-called Hindu-first campaign has become more strident with its divisive programs such as the citizenship test in Assam.

There have also been reports of a rise in the lynching of Muslim cattle traders in the country’s northern province since Modi’s election.

SS